Crossing Borders and Queering Citizenship: Civic Reading Practice in Contemporary American and Canadian Writing

216 Pages·2019·14.256 MB·English

by  Zalfa Feghali

Crossing borders and

queering citizenship
Contemporary American and Canadian Writers

Series Editors
Nahem Yousaf and Sharon Monteith
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Crossing borders

and queering
citizenship
Civic reading practice in contemporary
American and Canadian writing
Zalfa Feghali
Manchester University Press
Copyright © Zalfa Feghali 2019
The right of Zalfa Feghali to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 7849 9309 2 hardback
First published 2019
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for any external or third- party internet websites referred to in this book, and
does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK
For my grandparents,

Anna, who never learned to read, and Adamos,
who always read to her

Contents

Series editors’ foreword viii
Acknowledgements x
Introduction: why queer(y) citizenship? 1
1 Reading: an act of queering citizenship 17
2 Autobiographical acts of reading and the work of
Gloria Anzaldúa and Dorothy Allison 35
3 Métis and two- spirit vernaculars in the writing of
Gregory Scofield 57
4 Performing the border and queer rasquachismo in
Guillermo Gómez- Peña’s performance art 93
5 The antianaesthetic and ‘a community of readers’ in
Erín Moure’s O Cidadán 125
6 Reading for hemispheric citizenship in Junot Díaz’s
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 153
Conclusion: Yann Martel’s lonely book club 173
Bibliography 182
Index 201
Series editors’ foreword

This innovative series reflects the breadth and diversity of writing over
the last thirty years, and provides critical evaluations of established,
emerging and critically neglected writers – mixing the canonical with
the unexpected. It explores notions of the contemporary and ana-
lyses current and developing modes of representation with a focus on
individual writers and their work. The series seeks to reflect both the
growing body of academic research in the field, and the increasing
prevalence of contemporary American and Canadian fiction on
programmes of study in institutions of higher education around the
world. Central to the series is a concern that each book should argue
a stimulating thesis, rather than provide an introductory survey, and
that each contemporary writer will be examined across the trajectory
of their literary production. A variety of critical tools and literary and
interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged to illuminate the ways in
which a particular writer contributes to, and helps readers rethink, the
North American literary and cultural landscape in a global context.
Central to debates about the field of contemporary fiction is its role
in interrogating ideas of national exceptionalism and transnation-
alism. This series matches the multivocality of contemporary writing
with wide- ranging and detailed analysis. Contributors examine the
drama of the nation from the perspectives of writers who are members
of established and new immigrant groups, writers who consider
themselves on the nation’s margins as well as those who chronicle
middle America. National labels are the subject of vociferous debate
and including American and Canadian writers in the same series
is not to flatten the differences between them but to acknowledge
that literary traditions and tensions are cross- cultural and that North
American writers often explore and expose precisely these tensions.
The series recognises that situating a writer in a cultural context